A Fire Retardant garden may
be indicated in areas of high fire exposure or to protect wood
or other structures which may be extraordinarily vulnerable to
fire. This is mostly a native plant list but some popular
non-natives are listed.

The plants represented in this garden were
used by Native Americans for food, tools, weapons, housing,
cordage, and/or a myriad of other uses. This is an
educational garden and not necessarily a water-wise one.
This is an application for all of Southern California, therefore
many of the plants in this listing may not flourish in the High
Desert.

Many of the plants
of the Southwest are among the most fragrant of all plants.
Placing them near sitting areas or along sidewalks will result
in a pleasant fragrance experience for most, if not all, of the year.

Plant the
hummingbird plants and they will come. Further, sugar
water is not particularly healthy for hummingbirds, so by
featuring these plants in your garden, you are doing these great
little visitors a considerable favor. Should you use
hummingbirds feeders, however, you should fill them with high
fructose sugar water.

Most of these plants will require no water whatsoever
once established. Nonetheless, many will grow faster and
bloom more profusely with a little watering help. Plants
which require no water will be marked with
*.

A moonlight garden
consists of plants which have light colored branches and
foliage, and white flowers which can be seen in the moonlight or
ambient artificial light
... a great feature for warm summer nights.

Many trees and
shrubs which grow several thousand feet above the Mojave Desert,
grow well in the High Desert and require little or no water once
established. Indeed, you can have the Lake Arrowhead or
Crestline look if you so desire. Most mountain plants,
however, are
pollinated by wind and are hard on people with asthma or
allergies.

Food and nesting
sites are an attraction for songbirds and the plants featured in
this garden selection do just that. Augment your songbird
garden with waterers and birds houses and you will enjoy the
result.

Many plants of the
Mojave Desert also grow in the much lower and hotter Sonoran
Desert and visa versa. It should also be noted that some
Sonoran plants will not grow, however, in the High Desert.
Here is a selection that will.

Plants for a park
or for a place where children will be playing are obviously more
ideal if they are thornless. Most of these plants,
however, do not do well with the volume of water it takes to
maintain grass. Thornless plants are also recommended
along walkways.

This is required
reading if you are to understand our philosophy of watering
native plants which are planted from pots.

Envelope Construction

The concept of envelope construction
is the simple one of leaving a minimum construction scar at the
given site. Depending upon what is being built, an area
around the immediate construction is cleared to give adequate
construction access to the workers. The native area
surrounding the immediate site is not disturbed. Upon
completion of construction, native plants are introduced or
re-introduced into the disturbed area. If indicated, these
native plants may be fire retardant. This method of
construction results in minimum environmental damage and savings
to the developer and is now required in many southwestern
desert communities.

High Pollinators

All high
pollinating plants are not necessarily totally undesirable, but
their application should take place with eyes widen open.
Clearly high pollinating plants should not be used in
landscaping for a health care facility, or in a condominium,
apartment, or hotel courtyard. Neither should these plants
be set close to a house, especially if it has occupants who are
afflicted with asthma or allergies. The high pollinators
are plants which use the wind to spread their pollen. The
worst are dioecious plants which have separate male and female
plants. Here the males must expel huge volumes of pollen
in order to germinate distant female individuals to ensure the
survival of the species. These include our ubiquitous
native California Junipers and ephedras (Mormon teas and
Jointfirs). Some
other junipers, cypresses, and ephedras are
high pollinating dioecious plants.

But there also monoecious plants which depend on the wind
for pollination, even though both male and female sex organs are
on the same plant. Though these plants do not emit the
same volume of pollen as the dioecious plants, they nonetheless
are relatively high pollinators, and should not be used in the
aforementioned landscape applications. The main culprits
in this category are the conifers (pines, firs, and spruces),
oaks, mimosa or silk tree, poplars
(including the cottonwoods and aspen), sumacs, olives, and
numerous sod type grasses including fescue, Bermuda grass, Johnson grass,
Kentucky bluegrass, orchard grass, sweet vernal grass, and
Timothy grass. Grass pollinization may be mitigated by
regular mowing.

Some people may be allergic even to plants which do not
emit pollen, but have fragrances caused by aromatic oils in
leaves or flowers. Such hyper-allergic persons should do
their research before purchasing any aromatic plant.

Invaders

Invasive plants are
a major problem in the High Desert. Particularly
vulnerable is that area of the Mojave River in which water
remains on the surface the year-round. Most of these
plants send their seeds down river during the rains where they
germinate and choke out native species. Some, however, are
spread by wind. By far, the most
invasive plant is the High Desert are the Phragmites, or as most
people call them, River cane or Bamboo. These plants can
not only reproduce sexually by seed, but they can reproduce
asexually with rhizomes (subterranean root suckers). The national data base of
invasive plants lists, in addition to Phragmites, Locusts, Olives and
Salt Cedar or Tamarisk. We have also observed Mimosa and Pampas
grass invaders growing along the Mojave River in Victorville and
Oro Grande, as well. Please visit this link for the
government list of invasive plants:
http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/main.shtml.

Water Hogs

All riparian plants
are water hogs whose only valid use in the High Desert, in some
cases, is along
the shores of the Mojave River or on park or limited
residential lawns in which the grass must be watered regularly
anyway. Nonetheless, many riparian plants have shallow roots
and have a propensity to damage nearby sidewalks, driveways, and
foundations, and to invade septic tanks and sewer lines.
The riparian plants seem to be the most popular plants offered
at the local nurseries, particularly the "big box" hardware
stores who, despite their advertising claims, seem to know
little about what kind of plants are best for the High Desert.
The following are some riparian plants which meet the
aforementioned description:

Alders

Cottonwoods

Weeping Willow

Ashes

Poplars

Wild Roses

Aspens

Sycamores

Willows

Betonies

Palm Trees

Salt Cedars or Tamarisks

Non-native Plants

Even though they
are endorsed by many local agencies as being drought-tolerant,
few non-native plants are suitable for the high desert.
Almost all require much more water than do any of the
non-riparian native plants ... case-in-point: Cork Oak,
Italian Stone Pine, Austrian Black Pine, Aleppo Pine, and
Spanish Oak, to name a few, all require moderate watering, much
more than the native plants and all are recommended as
water-wise plants by our powers-that-be.

Food Gardens and Orchards

There is nothing
better nor healthier than fruits and vegetables from one's own
garden. We would hope that there never comes a time when
such endeavors are discouraged. So few citizens pursue
home gardening that we doubt that their effect upon the water
usage statistics is even measurable.

Palm Trees

Palm trees are
beautiful and majestic, but they do not grow well in the High
Desert, and they use considerable water. They are not native
to the western Mojave Desert. To plant them therefore is a
gamble. Many died as a result of the
severe winter of 2006-2007. Hundreds of thousand of dollars
were lost this year to those who gambled.
Many nurseries and landscape architects assured their customers
and clients that palm trees could survive the extreme weather of
the High Desert. They were dead wrong.

Other Observations

1. Native plants like their debris
or litter.
Some do not drop a great deal of debris, but others do.
Native plant debris is not flammable, not even pine
needles or oak leaves because their is little oxygen in
the debris layer. Rake up this debris and your
native plants will not thrive. The debris keeps
out competing weeds and retains needed moisture.
If you are bothered by the appearance of the debris, it
can be replaced by a layer of cedar chips (use only
cedar chips designated for this use). Once
the cedar chips are in place, allow the debris to rot
and break down into the cedar chips. Sorry, but
this may take a little time. Also, do not pile the
cedar chips up around the trunk. This may cause
trunk rot and kill the plant.

2. Honey bees are not native to the
Americas. They were brought here by the early
Europeans. Native plants are pollinated by one or
more of the following: wind, hummingbirds, moths,
butterflies, bumble bees, and/or bats. Nonetheless,
honey bees can pollinate many of our native plants.
They are excluded however by many of the trumpet shaped
plants which are favorites of hummingbirds like penstemons, some keckiellas, and others because they
can't reach the nectar. Don't want bees? Try
these.

3.All native
grasses are bunch or clump grasses. They grow in
tufts or clumps as opposed to sods. Many will put
down roots as far as five feet thereby allowing them to
flourish in extremely dry conditions. Bunch
grasses are perennials meaning they will often dry out
in the fall and come back the following year. All
grasses rely on wind for pollenization, but sod grasses
emit considerably more pollen than bunch grasses.
Grasses such as Bermuda, Johnson, Kentucky, Orchard,
Sweet vernal, and Timothy are extremely high
pollinators. Visit
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/conditions/asthma/pollen.cfm
for additional information.

4. The native plants represented in this
data base were not only a supermarket for the Native
Americans, but were a pharmacy. It is
not recommended that you, however, ingest these plants
for any purpose suggested herein or in any other source,
particularly for medicinal purposes.
Medicinal or toxic strength may vary significantly from
plant to plant, and it is easy to misidentify plants.
Further, many ethnobotany sources have been published by
unqualified authors. An example is that one local
native plant is touted as an effective expectorant.
Indeed it is, but it may also cause severe liver damage,
which is not mentioned in several sources which
recommend its use. The
Ethnobotanical
Garden listed herein includes plants which are NOT
necessarily water wise and some plants which will not grow in the High
Desert. The purpose of this garden is educational
especially for all Southern California 3rd and 4th graders
who study California Indians as part of their school
curriculum. This garden is designed to assist them
in establishing their own educational gardens.
However, this data should be of considerable value to
students and others of all ages in conducting
ethnobotanical research.